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Anyone who knows me knows what I'm about to say First, because of the small size of the landmasses double the size of the image. Second, put your landmasses on their own layer...lots of ways to do that so I won't take up space here by describing them all. New layer, filter - render - clouds. Duplicate this layer then do render - difference clouds 2 times. New layer, fill with black, decrease opacity to around 75%. New layer, ctrl-click your landmass layer then select - modify - expand - however much you want to expand by, select - feather - same as the amount you expanded by, fill with white, reduce opacity to around 25%, then click on the black layer and hit the delete key, then deselect. New layer then hit ctrl+alt+shift+E then filter - render - lighting effects (make sure that your light covers the whole image and also use a texture channel and click on "white is high" and move the slider to "mountains". The mountains might be out of place but you can delete this layer and go back to the clouds, black, or white layer and manually airbrush in some white or black to put the mountains where you want them. Here's an example. In my example I crop the land layer to fit the selection of the landmasses and put a black layer underneath (ocean coverup) then used an expanded and feathered selection (both 100) of the landmasses to delete holes in it.

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Last edited by Ascension; 12-18-2010 at 03:44 PM.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

Thanks Ascention, that side of things Im pretty ok on, what has got me at the moment is stretching out the zigzag map, and where the islands are cut into, with it into one continuous rectangle so I can use it to wrap aroung my sphere texture so I can render it, the creating of the textures for the islands Im fine with, but its rejoining the islands and the seas so they will be in the right place on the sphere.
I tried using the warp function but it seems to be beyond me atm, maybe its the cold weather affecting my mind.

Think of the image I posted as an orange peel that has been peeled off an orange, well I need to fit it back on the orange.

Oooohhh, right. So it's not a texture thing it's a projection thing. What needs to happen is to progressively warp things more and more the farther you get away from the equator...so that those edges join up. I'm guessing some other program would be needed for that 'cuz I've never figured out how to do it in PS alone. There are some programs out there, like Fractal Terrains, that render maps already warped (for fitting to a sphere) but to take an input image then warp it...I don't think that can be done. I'll bet someone here knows, though.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

Yikes !. I agree thats a tough one. I think there are two possible ways to do this. The first is to find which projection this is made in. You may have that info or else because the shape is somewhat unusual I would think it would be fairly easy to look it up in a list of map projections. The wikipedia has some good links on that. Once you have it then you should be able to get a program which changes map projections. I think Waldronate is the king of this type of thing here and I think his apps like Fractal Terrains and Wilbur have some projection stuff in them. There are also other programs that have been mentioned on this forum in the past. What I would do is find the name of the projection and get one of these apps to render out a sample of it so that it gives approximately the same style image. Then adjust yours to match the one rendered out getting the pixels lined up. Then import the new adjusted bitmap into the app and set its projection so that it can render out the sphere.

The other way is equally as difficult if not more so. But you could get a 3D app like Blender and get it to create a ball and render out the texture for the ball as a UV map. Then taking your image you would need to set up the pixels to UV coord mapping and then apply that texture to the ball again.

Actually, I am looking at this map and there is something wrong about it. The axis for longitude is equal spacing as is the latitude so this would imply that the position say at lat / long 30, 0 does not exist. Maybe the border to the region is not a projection - but then the shapes which are interrupted seem to join up. This would imply that across the interruption is the same coord so therefore it cant have a linear scale. I don't get this at all. I think its been mangled. I dont understand enough about projections to be confident about that tho.

I think its been totally mangled, I dont think its based on any mathamatical procedure at all just what the artist thought would look good.
I may just have to use the smaller scale maps I have of the islands to piece together the whole thing.

If you take the El Mar Del Sur from this map and look at a smaller joined up version, does it appear that the island broken is split and separated onto the two leaves of this projection or does it appear as though this projection has merely been masked over the top and the whole middle of the island is missing from it ? Could you, for example, take this map and join back up the two halves and would they then sit on top of the other smaller scale version without being warped by some projection ? I'm just curious whether this projection is real or just some kind of outline placed over the map and labeled up as one. Its a well strange situation going on...

It's not a "real" projection in the sense that it is mathematically stretching a sphere onto a plane. It looks like someone was inspired by Goode's Homolosine projection and did something vaguely like that, but without an understanding as to WHY Goode split the map the way he did.

One possible way to try to get things back together (assuming that you don't have local-area maps) is to print the map above, fold it so that the split areas line up, then take a picture of the area of interest. There will be some distortion, but it's a realtively low-tech way to get the source info back.

The other way, of course, is just to slice and dice in an image editing program.

theres no piece missing the artist who did this decided to split the island in half in a few places, its a shame the original artist isnt working on this, but its poor old me instead. Im trying atm to stretch the map around so I have the aproxamate location of where everything should be, I have all the blown up maps of the islands, so I should be able to replace them on the map in the position they should be in, and then go from there.